This book is part of a book series called Oxford Reading Tree .

This book is aimed at children in primary school. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading book uses the Synthetic phonics method. (This can also be referred to as 'blended phonics' or 'inductive phonics'). A phonics approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences. In Synthetic Phonics, children are taught to sound and blend from the start of reading tuition. Children are taught a small group of letter sounds and then shown how these can be co-articulated to pronounce unfamiliar words. Other groups of letters are then taught and the children blend them in order to pronounce new words. The pronunciation of the word is discovered through sounding and blending, and spelling by mapping sounds to letters. Consonant blends that cannot be read by blending are explicitly taught.

This book was published 1986 by Oxford University Press .

Roderick Hunt started out as a teacher, but began writing for children in 1970. He collaborated with Alex Brychta on a series of children books for the Oxford Reading Tree which had an animated spin-off, The Magic Key series. Roderick and Alex won the prestigious Outstanding Achievement Award at the Education Resources Awards 2009. Now he says, "On my income tax form I put down my profession as storyteller. It never fails to raise an eyebrow. " He lives in London.